Here is the 4th Tournament Announcement for the spring of 2010. It isn't actually what was originally planned because those ideas became unnecessary or abandoned. Instead, we have this small, yet important, announcement for everyone.

New Director: Tupence

Tupence has left the Suggestions Team to come join us a 5th Tournament Director. At this point in time, Tupence's primary responsibility will be working on planning and implementing Tournament Contests from time to time to provide opportunities for competition that are not strictly tournament based. An example of a Tournament Contest is the vote for the Best Tournament of 2009 that Lindax led. Please give Tupence a warm welcome.

Tournament Director Task Distribution

In our efforts to make sure our tasks are always up to date, our Task Distribution List has been updated. Steelhorse will be making sure completed tournaments (that are properly labeled) are moved to the Completed forum and make sure the database is updated and medals distributed. Night Strike will now be handling all the tougher questions like "can he refuse me?", "can i solve a problem like this", etc. Appeals on my decisions can be decided by the group of all the directors or by discussing your complaint to an administrator. This will hopefully make sure answers are consistent and keeps the other volunteers from having to spend a bunch of time coming up with solutions to the stickier issues.

Thank you to everybody, both old and new, who contribute to the CC Tournaments. Be on the lookout for some more updates in the middle or late summer.

So a thought on the contests. One of the things that has been noted is that in some ways they've become a manner for those with the largest "lists" to win. There will be 4 or 5 things to vote for and one or more of the nominees will PM a large group of people which unduly influences the results. Sometimes its an intentional "Vote for me" plea. Other times its a less obvious thing where a TO will be calling attention to the vote with a "even if you don't vote for me, go and vote" type of plea. The problem there is that their list are people already familiar with the work involved of that TO and it becomes a de facto vote for me plea.

I would thus suggest that any TO involved in a future contest that sends out any sort of PM advertising a contest that they are involved in, is disqualified. Now clearly you're not going to monitor every PM but sending a PM to 10 players isn't going to make that big a difference, sending it to 1000 will but those are the ones you want to catch anyway.

barterer2002 wrote:So a thought on the contests. One of the things that has been noted is that in some ways they've become a manner for those with the largest "lists" to win. There will be 4 or 5 things to vote for and one or more of the nominees will PM a large group of people which unduly influences the results. Sometimes its an intentional "Vote for me" plea. Other times its a less obvious thing where a TO will be calling attention to the vote with a "even if you don't vote for me, go and vote" type of plea. The problem there is that their list are people already familiar with the work involved of that TO and it becomes a de facto vote for me plea.

I would thus suggest that any TO involved in a future contest that sends out any sort of PM advertising a contest that they are involved in, is disqualified. Now clearly you're not going to monitor every PM but sending a PM to 10 players isn't going to make that big a difference, sending it to 1000 will but those are the ones you want to catch anyway.

This is an issue that has also caught our attention (our=TD's).

Just to throw out an idea: Why not avoid this issue coming up and having to disqualify people? Not to mention the fact that we have no way of checking people's PMs.

How about a voting comity for every contest? Some TDs, some TOs and some regular tournament players? Obviously that could be another comity for every contest....